Contents

Brief Overview

Purpose: This public comment period is being opened to obtain community input on the draft Program Implementation Review report.

Current Status: The draft Program Implementation Review report is posted for public comment for the ICANN community's review and consideration. To facilitate the review and analysis of all comments, we request that commenters clearly indicate to which section(s) of the report their comments relate.

Next Steps: Following the review of public comments received on this report, ICANN will prepare and publish a summary and analysis of the comments received. The draft report will be updated as appropriate. The final report and summary and analysis of public comments will be provided to the Review Team called for by the Affirmation of Commitments, for its review of the New gTLD Program's promotion of competition, consumer choice, and consumer trust.

Section I: Description and Explanation

ICANN is seeking input on the draft Program Implementation Review report, which contains ICANN's observations from the operational experience of administering the 2012 round of the New gTLD Program. The report is intended to capture ICANN's experiences and lessons learned, and public comments will help to record the community's observations from the implementation of the New gTLD Program.

The following topics are covered:

Application Processing

Application Evaluation

Objections Procedures

Contention Resolution

Transition to Delegation

Applicant Support

Continued Operations Instrument

Program Management

The draft Program Implementation Review report documents the experiences gained during implementation for consideration in future application rounds. To support this intention and to capture the lessons learned first-hand, the report is a self-assessment performed by a staff review team at ICANN. However, many stakeholders have played a major role in the Program. Accordingly, input received from applicants, service providers, and other members of the community on various elements of the Program has been incorporated into this draft report. ICANN seeks and encourages additional input from stakeholders during this public comment period. Stakeholder input will be considered and taken into account in updating the draft report. While ICANN believes it is beneficial to document and publish its analysis of the experience gained in implementing the Program, it also values the experience and insight from others who participated in the process. It is recognized that other stakeholders are performing their own reviews, and this review is not intended to replace those reviews nor to represent the experience of all stakeholders.

In particular, ICANN is seeking comments on the lessons learned for each section, which have been summarized in Annex 1 of the draft Program Implementation Review report. Many of the lessons learned are considerations for future application rounds, and ICANN welcomes the community's input on how the implementation of future rounds could be improved upon.

All comments will be reviewed and analyzed in the report of public comments, which will be included as a supplement to the final report.

To provide consistency and to facilitate the discussion, ICANN requests that commenters clearly indicate the relevant sections of the report within their comments.

Section II: Background

The New gTLD Program was the first effort to enable expansion of the DNS on such a large scale. The implementation guidance provided in the community-developed Applicant Guidebook described many complex and previously untested concepts and processes.

The Affirmation of Commitments, signed in 2009 by the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN, provides for ongoing commitment reviews. Section 9.3 describes a review of the New gTLD Program in terms of promoting competition, consumer trust, and consumer choice to be performed by volunteer community members ("Review Team"):

If and when new gTLDs (whether in ASCII or other language character sets) have been in operation for one year, ICANN will organize a review that will examine the extent to which the introduction or expansion of gTLDs has promoted competition, consumer trust and consumer choice, as well as effectiveness of (a) the application and evaluation process, and (b) safeguards put in place to mitigate issues involved in the introduction or expansion.

The draft Program implementation Review report is ICANN's assessment of the execution of New gTLD Program processes, and it is intended to help inform the Review Team's assessment of the effectiveness of the application and evaluation process. The report documents the experiences of the ICANN staff members charged with executing the New gTLD Program. Other reviews are also being undertaken by ICANN to help inform the Review Team's work on the competition, consumer trust, and consumer choice, and safeguards aspects of the Program. ICANN also recognizes that there are ongoing efforts by the community to review various aspects of the New gTLD Program. The Review Team may also wish to consider including the work of these community groups in its review.

Section IV: Additional Information

A session at the ICANN54 Public Meeting in Dublin, Ireland will be held in October 2015. The session is intended to provide the community with an opportunity to share their comments in a public forum, and to interact with ICANN staff directly on this topic.

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Domain Name System

Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."